Remember When (Ravenswood #4)

Chapter Three

Clarissa led the way along a lengthy corridor toward the west wing and then through the ballroom and out onto the terrace, where two comfortable chairs had already been brought out, a small table between them. They had been set up in the corner of the terrace where the shade cast by the building had already receded to admit the warm sunshine.

Clarissa had decided to invite Matthew Taylor to stay for coffee on impulse. After looking over the design for the crib he was bringing for her approval, she had planned to go outside herself to enjoy the warmer weather, perhaps to go up the hill beyond the west wing and sit inside the temple folly, from which there was a fine view over the park and surrounding countryside. She would not even bother with a book this morning, she had thought. She knew she would not read it. Just when she might have expected to enjoy long hours of reading to her heart’s content, she seemed to be right off books. All she wanted to do was gaze about her and think and dream. It was unusual for her. She had never imagined that doing nothing would appeal to her. There had always been so much to do and so much she wished to do if only she had the time.

Being alone and idle once she had dealt with the business of the crib, then, had been her plan. Yet here she was, seated on the terrace outside the ballroom, Matthew beside her, waiting for a coffee tray to be brought out. So much for solitude.

But why should even her hours of idleness be mapped out ahead of time? Why should she not sit here with an old friend if she wished, talking about nothing in particular? She was not bound by any schedule, especially a self-imposed one.

It was a concept to which she found it strangely difficult to accustom herself. She had no one to please but herself for the next couple of months. She had come home to Ravenswood for this very purpose, to discover herself anew, to learn how to enjoy her life free of her usual compulsion always to be doing something useful, always trying to please everyone and behave as they expected her to behave. She had done that all her married life and even in the six years since Caleb’s passing. It was hard to learn how to be selfish.

She smiled at the thought. Was that what she could be for the rest of her life if she chose? Could she really choose anything? Be anybody? Was that what freedom was?

Matthew had once been her closest friend. Closer in many ways than her own brother, whom she adored. Certainly closer than any of her female friends who sometimes came to spend an afternoon or even a full day with her or invited her to spend a day with them. She remembered very little of all those visits, except a lot of giggling.

But Matthew had of necessity become a near stranger after she married Caleb. Then he had disappeared for more than ten years. When he returned, he had been different. Among other things, he had come to Boscombe as the village carpenter and did not socialize exclusively with the gentry of the neighborhood, although he was a gentleman himself. She and Caleb had still been married then. She had been the Countess of Stratton. She had had children to raise and duties to perform. Any real friendship with him had been out of the question. It had become a habit to treat him as a mere acquaintance, to acknowledge him whenever they met, but never to speak with him at any length.

Yet for the past six years she had been essentially free of the obligations imposed by her marriage.

She turned her head to look curiously at him now as he squinted off toward the lake. She tried to see in him the boy of whom she had been so dearly fond all those years ago. He had been very slender then, to the point of thinness, in fact. He was still slim and wiry in build. He still had all his hair, though the darkness of it was sprinkled with gray. There was even still that lock that had insisted upon falling down over his forehead. His face was as angular as it had always been, with some lines fanning out from the corners of his eyes. Those eyes were still very dark, though they were less intense than they used to be. His jaw was hard and firm but not as stubborn as it had been then. He was not a handsome man, just as he had not been a handsome boy. But he had always been striking in appearance. He still was.

Attractive was perhaps the word for which her mind searched. He was still attractive. And it occurred to her that she had not allowed herself to admit that in all the years he had been living in Boscombe. She had never allowed herself to be fully free—a startling thought when she had lived such a privileged life of luxury.

She wondered what story lay behind his settling here as a carpenter, specifically in rooms above Oscar Holland’s smithy, when his grandmother had left him her stately manor house and pretty park and accompanying farmland when she died not very long after the death of his wife, the former Poppy Lang. It could not have been more than a year or so after his disappearance. And what was the story behind that unexpected marriage of his, so soon after her own?

There was so much of the more than thirty years since their friendship ended about which she knew nothing—because she had been living her own busy life. She had thought of him occasionally, of course, and wondered about him and worried a bit about him when he disappeared and no one knew where he had gone. After his return and the surprise of his settling so close, she had grown accustomed to seeing him from time to time and not thinking of him too much. Many childhood friendships waned and even disappeared when one grew up and grew apart, after all.

She had put her husband and family and her social duties as Countess of Stratton before all else. It was what she had been raised to do, what all ladies were expected to do. But why was she still doing it when she no longer had a husband, when her children were all grown, and when the bulk of her social obligations had been taken over by Gwyneth?

It was these very questions she had come home to consider, of course, though she had not been thinking specifically of Matthew when she made the decision—except she had known that above all else she must see that carving again and find out if the woman against the tree really was her. She had not asked herself why it was important that she know.

Now she sat and gazed at Matthew and wondered…They were thirty-three years older than they had been then, when she had stood against that tree and he had gazed silently at her. But they were still alive. They were both free.

He was a carpenter living and working above an old smithy, while she was a dowager countess with an earl for a son, a duchess for a daughter, a cavalry colonel for another son. She lived at Ravenswood Hall. It might be foolish to dismiss those facts as though they did not matter. But he was a gentleman just as she was a gentleman’s daughter. Why should they not resume some sort of friendship if they wished? It could never be quite as it had been, of course. She could not picture them frolicking about the park here almost all day, every day, through the summer. But could it not be something that would offer them both some companionship and simple enjoyment?

She did not know how he would react to such a suggestion. She really did not know him at all. He did not know her. They were virtual strangers. They had been children when they were friends. They were middle-aged adults now. They had lived quite separate lives in the interim, moving along ever-divergent paths.

But…

But he kept that wood carving in his bedchamber, and it really was a carving of her, as he remembered her from that last day of their friendship. It pulsed with emotion, if it was possible for wood to do any such thing. It was, of course, the carver rather than the wood who had put the emotion there.

She wondered how he was feeling now. They had been sitting in silence since they sat down. Perhaps for him it was an excruciatingly uncomfortable silence.

“It is lovely out here,” he said, as though he had read her thoughts. But his words sounded heartfelt, not just a stilted conversational opener.

“We are very fortunate to live in England,” she said. “In Britain.”

There was the suggestion of a smile in his eyes when he turned his head to look at her. “Now, how many other countries do you know, so you can make a fair comparison?” he asked.

“None.” She laughed. “But I stick by my opinion. I cannot imagine anywhere on earth I would rather be.”

“Actually,” he said, “nor can I.”

“And what other countries do you know?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Most of the countries of Europe,” he said. “Countries of the East. India. Nepal.”

She stared at him. “They are where you went during the missing years?” she asked.

“The missing years,” he said, still looking slightly amused. “They were not missing for me. I was there the whole time, keeping an eye on them. They were crucial years in making me the person I am today.”

And who is that? she wanted to ask him. For he was very different from the rebellious, troubled, often sullen boy of her memory.

“You ran away,” she said. “Had your life become so unendurable that you could not stay? Though I do not really need to ask. I am more sorry than I can express in words for the grief you were made to endure.”

“I did not run away from anything,” he said. “I always knew, after all, even as a boy, that I could never escape from myself. It was the one thing I must always carry with me wherever I went, like a persistent shadow. When I left, Clarissa, I ran to.”

But they were interrupted at that point by the arrival of their coffee, and Clarissa was not sure if he had finished his sentence or not. The footman who brought the tray poured them each a cup before withdrawing, and Clarissa waited for Matthew to add cream to his before she offered him the plate of freshly baked shortbread biscuits.

“Thank you,” he said, setting one in his saucer. He stirred his coffee. “You cannot know what guilt a man feels when his wife dies as a consequence of childbirth. And the child…She was perfect in every way except that she never drew breath. My grandmother and my parents and brother heaped words of comfort upon me, assuring me that it was all for the best since Poppy was beneath me socially and had a bit of a temper and a sharp tongue to go with it and an unsavory reputation as a woman of questionable morals. It was even possible, they hinted, that the child—she was Helena, but they never called her by name—was not mine. Poppy, they implied, had lured me, a gullible, mixed-up boy of eighteen, four years her junior, into giving her respectability.”

“Oh.” Clarissa grimaced as she absently stirred cream into her own coffee. And the thing was that his relatives, his parents at least, would truly have intended their words to be comforting to the bereaved husband and father. They were respectable, well-meaning people, Mr. and Mrs. Taylor, both now deceased. They had done their best to sort out their troubled younger son and form him into the sort of man they believed he must learn to be. The fact that what they were trying to do was impossible had only ever frustrated them and made them try harder. They had been totally without imagination or sensitivity. They had lacked the ability to discover who their son was and how they might best guide and help him to a future that would bring him both security and personal fulfillment. “I am so sorry, Matthew. But the thing is that they must truly have believed they were saying what would soothe your grief.”

“Strangely enough,” he said, “I can see that now. I can understand them as I doubt they ever understood me. I can forgive them and hope that before their deaths they forgave me for making their lives a true hell for many years.”

“Did you find what you were searching for after you left here?” she asked. “Or is my question too intrusive?”

He took a bite of his biscuit and chewed and swallowed before answering. He was gazing off toward the lake again.

“I am not sure I was consciously searching for anything,” he said. “I just wanted to be away from everything and everyone familiar. I wanted to be alone with myself in places I had never been and with people who did not know me. I wanted to let go of my self-centeredness, my bitter hatreds and disappointments. I felt them poisoning my whole being and needed to be rid of them. I did find one thing after I arrived in Switzerland, however. I even stayed there for a few years. I found wood carvings everywhere. They were on every building—beautiful and exuberant. They were in churches and in village squares and on mountaintops. They were in shops and workshops. I was in awe of the vision and skill of all those workers. I stayed and apprenticed myself to one I admired particularly, who was willing to take me on and teach me what he knew. And suddenly my hands felt like an essential part of me again and I knew I was doing what I wanted to do, what I needed to do and would always do no matter what else the future held for me.”

Clarissa set down her empty cup and saucer on the table beside her. She did so quietly in the hope that she would not break his train of thought. But he turned his head to look at her cup and the coffeepot, and she poured them each a second cup and offered the plate of biscuits again. He stirred cream into his cup but did not take another biscuit.

“It was not until I finally left Switzerland, though, and went to Italy,” he said, “that I understood what I really wanted to do, what I must do with wood. I went inside St. Peter’s church in Vatican City, as all visitors to Rome do, I suspect, and I saw the Pietà , sculpted by Michelangelo. It is a depiction of the crucified Christ, newly taken down from the cross and splayed across his mother’s lap while she looks down at him. I stood there for hours without moving, for almost the whole of one afternoon, in fact. I could not tear my eyes away from it. Someone approached me eventually and took my arm and spoke gently, asking if I needed to sit down, if I needed a glass of water or wine. It was only then that I realized my cheeks were wet with tears.”

The coffee had cooled in Clarissa’s cup, but she did not even notice.

“The skill and design of the sculpture were beyond perfect,” he said. “It would be a masterpiece based on those alone. But it was not those things that held me in a sort of trance for so long. It was the sheer raw passion coming through it that enthralled me. And the word through is the right one. There was no emotion in the material of which it was made. It was cold white marble. The passion was in the sculpting of it. Michelangelo is long dead, but he left an essential part of himself in that work, and probably in others too. He had left himself, his whole being, in it, in fact. You will think my words impossibly extravagant, Clarissa, and I have never spoken thus to anyone else. But that sculpture changed my life. I would never work with either stone or marble. Wood was my medium. But I knew that skill was not enough. A true artist puts everything that is himself and beyond himself into every serious work he creates. And I believed I was a true artist.”

Clarissa was taken with the magic of speaking to an old friend again, and how quickly they had both fallen back into their openness and familiarity. She scarcely breathed lest he stop talking before he had finished his story. But a few words struck her with more force than all the rest— I have never spoken thus to anyone else .

It was as it had been between them all those years ago.

It was almost as though he had the same thought. “You were always too good a listener, Clarissa,” he said, turning his head to look at her again. “And I was always too much of a talker. You must be thinking me very self-absorbed indeed. What of you? You have a lovely family. Have they brought you happiness? Has this brought you happiness?” He indicated the park and the house behind them with one sweeping gesture of his arm.

“Happiness, unhappiness, and every feeling between the two extremes,” she said. “In fifty years of living it would be strange indeed if I had not experienced them all numerous times. One thing age has taught me, however, is that one ought not to be deceived when one is at an extreme into believing that it is permanent. The worst unhappiness fades, as does the brightest happiness. One learns to flow with life’s ups and downs if one is to know a pervading contentment. On the whole I have done my best, especially in my dealings with other people. I have made most of the right choices, with one or two exceptions, a few of them huge. But I would not go back to change them even if the chance were offered me.” She did not speak unkindly, but she did look directly at him.

“You would not go back, then, to the age of seventeen and make a different choice?” he asked.

“No, of course not,” she said.

“Well, there is a slap in the face to me,” he said.

She looked sharply at him, but that suggestion of a smile was back in his eyes.

“What nonsense,” she said. “There is no way on earth I could have chosen you or you me.”

“You might have lived in abject poverty if you had,” he said. “No one knew at the time that my grandmother would take pity on me and leave me everything.”

“That was the very least of the reasons, Matthew,” she said, frowning. “As you know very well. We were friends. Any closer connection would not have worked even if you had known about your grandmother’s will. We would have been wretchedly unhappy within a year. Less.”

“Would we? Because I was so addled in the head that sometimes I did not know up from down?” He grinned unexpectedly. “Do you remember when we always used to talk like this, Clarissa? About our feelings and frustrations and triumphs? No subject was barred, was it? Except perhaps the weather and the state of our health in order to keep the silence at bay.”

“It is rare, that sort of friendship,” she said. “I have known it with only one other person, though most of our ramblings down the years have been shared in long letters to each other more than in person. We met when we were both new brides. Coincidentally, we were married on the same day at the same hour, though in different parts of the country. Kitty was widowed before I was. She married George last year.”

“Your brother?” He raised his eyebrows. “The former Lady Catherine Emmett, then?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m surprised you remember. But let me ask you something else. Do you feel like climbing the hill to the temple folly, Matthew? The view from up there is worth the climb.”

He hesitated a moment before getting to his feet. “I am a workingman,” he said. “I scheduled one hour for my appointment here and have already exceeded that. However…” He gestured with one hand toward the hill.

“Thank you. Now, you asked about my family,” she said as they stepped off the terrace onto the grass. “But we went off on a conversational tangent, as we always used to do. Let me answer your question. They have been and still are a constant source of delight to me. I have been very fortunate. Perhaps it was sheer luck on my part that I learned early that children of the same parents and home and upbringing are nevertheless all completely different from one another. To expect or to try to demand that they all behave in a similar manner is pointless and can only cause a fractious relationship and a frustrated parent and child.”

Too late she realized that she might have been describing Matthew himself and his brother. He did not say anything in the short silence that followed as they began to climb the steep slope to the temple. He offered his hand to help her climb.

It was a strong hand, she discovered when she took it. A workman’s hand. There was a roughness to it, perhaps even some calluses on his palm.

“Devlin was always fated to be the next Earl of Stratton, of course,” she said. “Tentative plans were made for Nicholas, as the second son, to have a military career and Owen, as the third son, to have a career in the church. We never pressed the point, but Nicholas embraced the idea. He never wanted anything else for his future but to be a cavalry officer. Owen, on the other hand…Well, we soon gave up on the idea of his being a clergyman. He was full of mischief from his infancy on. He lived for the pleasure of playing practical jokes on all of us, especially poor Stephanie, as the one sibling younger than he. Though I must not describe her as ‘poor Stephanie.’ She always gave as good as she got. She used to merely roll her eyes when she discovered long-legged spiders in her bed or frogs in her rain boots and would transfer the creatures to his bed and his boots. I do not believe I have ever heard Steph scream. Owen still does not know what he wants to do when he grows up, though he already is grown up.”

“How old is he now?” he asked.

“Twenty-two,” she said. “He told me a few weeks ago when we were both in London that he sometimes thinks he would be quite happy devoting his life to the church if it were not for the religious part of it.”

“He is mildly muddleheaded?” he said, releasing her hand as they reached the top of the hill and turned together to look at the wide view over parkland and farmland and river and village.

“He told me that if being a clergyman required only love and service, which after all are at the very heart of our religion,” she said, “he would be at the front of the queue to sign up.”

They both laughed.

“He would have a congregation of at least one,” he said. “I believe I might attend his church.”

He did not attend the church in Boscombe.

They went to sit on the sofa inside the temple. The view was somehow enhanced from in there by the fact that it was framed by tall stone pillars, which held up the pedimented roof.

“Your daughter—Helena—would have been Devlin’s age now,” she said quietly, wondering if all her talk about her children had struck a nerve with him.

“Yes,” he said. “Almost exactly.”

Almost exactly. Yet he had married Poppy after she married Caleb. Which must mean…But it was none of her business.

“Did you ever consider remarrying?” she asked.

“No,” he said.

He obviously did not want to talk about what must have been the most painful period of his life. They sat in silence for a few minutes—a not uncomfortable silence.

“I was at the ball here during the summer fete ten years ago,” he said. “I did not usually go, you know. I always enjoyed the activities of the day, but I never had energy left to come back here in the evening to trip the light fantastic with all my neighbors. On that occasion, however, Oscar Holland and his wife would not take no for an answer, so I came.”

The culminating event of every fete had always taken place in the ballroom here. The dancing usually spilled out onto the terrace, where she and Matthew had drunk their coffee a short while ago. They had almost always been fortunate enough to have lovely weather. Indeed, she could not remember a year when they had not.

“I was sorry for what happened that evening,” he said.

Caleb had come up here to this very place after supper with one of the guests at the ball—a newcomer to the village, a pretty young woman who had described herself as a widow in search of some peace. In fact, she had been Caleb’s mistress, whom he had brought from London with him after the parliamentary session came to an end. He had crossed an invisible line that year. He had spent a few months of every spring in London, leaving his family here, and of course Clarissa had known he did not remain celibate during those months. But never before had he tried to bring his two worlds together.

Devlin, who had come up to the temple folly with Gwyneth on some sort of romantic tryst of their own, had found the two lovers inside the temple under compromising circumstances. And Devlin had chosen to make a fuss, a very loud and public fuss, which had ended down on the terrace outside the ballroom and put an abrupt end to the ball. There had been no way of glossing over what had happened.

“It was one of those catastrophes from which it seems recovery is impossible,” she said. “I believed the world as I knew it had come to an end. I sent Devlin away. He saw it as open rejection on my part, and in some way perhaps he was right—to my shame. But mostly, I believe, I wanted to shield him from the crashing inward of his world. For he had not known. I do not believe any of our children had.”

“But you had?” he said.

“Of course,” she said. “I had been married longer than twenty years at the time, Matthew. It would have been impossible not to know. But no word was ever spoken between us. And, if it is possible to believe, ours was in many ways a good marriage. We were fond of each other, and we both adored our children. He would weep when it was time to return to London and again when he returned for the summer. It was not hypocrisy. He genuinely loved his home and family.”

She knew from his initial silence that he was not convinced.

“I am not sure if you know how you were spoken of in the village and neighborhood after it happened,” he said. “It was never ever with derision or condemnation, Clarissa, though I know women are often blamed when their men go astray, as though there was some deficiency in them that excused the men for seeking comfort elsewhere. You were always spoken of with respect and sympathy and admiration. You were seen as the perfect lady before it happened, and that did not change afterward, though for a long while you became almost a hermit.”

She sighed. “And what did you think of me, Matthew?” she asked before she could stop herself.

He turned to look directly at her, and suddenly she could see the boy he had been in the burning light of his eyes.

“I wanted to kill the bast—. I wanted to kill him with my bare hands,” he said.

“Ah.” She could not think what else to say. She despised herself for the thrill of pleasure his words gave her.

“At this rate,” he said, getting abruptly to his feet, “the Ellis baby is going to be born before I even make a start on his crib. Or hers. And Miss Wexford is going to don full mourning over the absence of her new table. Not to mention all the other jobs that need my attention. I must take my leave, Clarissa.”

She rose too, and they stepped outside the temple into the sunshine. She paused there, and he came to a stop beside her.

“Matthew,” she said, not looking at him. “Has it occurred to you that for the past six years there has been no reason at all why we cannot be friends again?”

“I believe we always have been friends,” he said.

“You know what I mean,” she said. “We have been friendly. It is a different thing. The past hour or two has taken me back to the way it used to be between us. We could always talk of things we did not confide to anyone else.”

“Yes,” he said. “It was usually me, spewing anger and frustration.”

“Not always,” she said. “You shared dreams too, just as I did. We used to find a great deal to laugh over. I want you to know I am going to be here alone at Ravenswood for at least the next couple of months. It was a deliberate choice on my part. I do not feel lonely. But I do feel that with the approach of my fiftieth birthday I need to rethink my life, look to the future more than I do the past. Will you be a part of that future? May we be friends again? May we spend some time together? When you have some to spare from your work, that is. And if it is something you want too. It is altogether possible you do not. Thirty-three years is a long time, after all. There may be nothing left to bring us together again except nostalgia.”

She was embarrassed by her own words and wished with all her heart she had kept her mouth shut.

“You want me to come here and spend time with you?” he asked, frowning. “People would inevitably see us. And people talk.”

“Does it matter?” she asked.

“The dowager countess and the carpenter?” he said. “It sounds like the title of a rather lurid tale, does it not?”

She shook her head and laughed. “But will you come?” she asked. “Just sometimes?”

He continued to frown. “I come into the park occasionally on open days,” he said. “I practice archery in the poplar alley.”

“Thursday is an open day,” she said. “Three days from now. May I have the pleasure of watching a private demonstration of your skill with a bow and arrow?”

“At three o’clock,” he said. “After I have finished work. Weather permitting.”

“I shall put in an order for fine weather and look forward to seeing you,” she said.

He began the descent of the hill without another word, though he stopped close to the top in order to offer the support of his hand again.

“Thursday, then,” he said abruptly when they reached the terrace.

And he strode away without further ado, along the outside of the west wing and around to the south wing and out of sight.

Clarissa stood on the terrace and watched him go.

She was still half wishing she had kept her mouth shut. He had not been vastly pleased by her suggestion. She was not sure she was. It might be quite impossible to recapture anything of the friendship that had been so precious to them both all those years ago, when they had been different people. Yet they had talked together easily today, as though they had been doing it all their lives. And he had told her things he had never told anyone else—about the years he had spent in Switzerland, learning the intricacies of carving wood, about his discovery of the Pietà in Rome and its effect upon him.

How she wished she could see that sculpture for herself.

No, she was not going to regret her impulsive decision to delay his departure this morning or her suggestion that they be friends again. People would talk, he had said. Let them. Friendship was too precious to be abandoned just because of wagging tongues. Besides, she had never found the people of this neighborhood to be particularly malicious. Even after the great scandal of that ball ten years ago, they had somehow been able to pick up the pieces of their lives, she and Caleb, and limp on together, largely because the people of Boscombe had chosen to behave as though nothing momentous had happened that night.

Matthew had gone in search of himself all those years ago, though he did not see it that way. And it seemed to Clarissa that he had found himself. She had never undertaken a similar search—until now. She had not realized that perhaps she ought. She had busied herself instead, made herself useful, tried to make herself warm and lovable to those who depended upon her. But it seemed there was less and less to busy herself about. Her usefulness had diminished, especially after Devlin’s marriage.

Perhaps almost more than anything else she needed a friend.